WebEx (now a $3.3b subsidiary of Cisco) is featuring us as one of their three highlighted launch partners for WebEx Connect at Enterprise 2.0 June 18-21 in Boston.
David Knight, VP of WebEx Connect, will be demo'ing EchoSign. In addition, EchoSign-for-WebEx Connect will be presented and demo'd in the WebEx booth at Enterprise 2.0.
Come see the next great evolution of EchoSign there if you can ... Track the deal with Saleforce ... Work it with WebEx ... Close it with EchoSign!
| |
|
WebEx today announced at the Web 2.0 Expo that EchoSign was one of a handful of Office 2.0 leaders partnering with WebEx to help launch WebEx Connect. WebEx Connect promises to be one of the most exciting ISV marketplaces, leveraging WebEx's vast SMB and SaaS presence with over 3,000,000 users of WebEx.
“We followed EchoSign closely since its emergence as one of the most innovative sales tools and Office 2.0 offerings. Like WebEx, EchoSign is truly changing the way business is done. We are very pleased to have EchoSign as one of the key launch partners for WebEx Connect,” said Shankar Iyer, vice president, WebEx Connect ecosystem.
More on WebEx Connect from ZD|Net here.
| |
|
We're very proud to announce both a partnership and a very deep product integration with Upside Software, the leading enterprise contract management service. Upside has a very strong footprint in the Fortune 500 and other leading clients including Purina, JC Penney, FedEx Kinko's, Boeing, HP, Microsoft, Rambus, and many more.
Upside's enterprise solution provides collaborative contract creation and negotiation, performance, compliance and risk management, amendment and renewal processing, and event management. There was just one hole in its workflow - getting the contracts signed, tracked and filed automatically. That's where EchoSign comes in.
Now, Upside's customers can completely automate the enterprise contract process, from creation to negotiation (via Upside), now to exchange, signature, and real-time tracking (via EchoSign), and then back through Upside for compliance, risk management, amendment and renewal processing.
Look for more here from us soon. It's a very interesting combination of leveraging the power of bringing a super-easy to use Office 2.0 application (EchoSign) into a very sophisticated and powerful enterprise software platform (Upside). The beauty of SaaS is that the solution is already available on-demand to all of Upside's customers.
See the press release here.
| |
|
Our good friends at Zoho have launched a feature that is pretty innovative - integration with EchoSign. For those who have not tried Zoho yet, Zoho is one of the leaders in web-based office tools, and the most innovative player in the space. Zoho Writer is a 100% web-based, and free, way to create and collaborate on documents.
From a Zoho perspective, it adds an exciting feature - get a document you are working on signed or approved. From a workflow perspective, though, it even more interesting. By combining the products, you can now:
* Collaborate on a draft document in Zoho
* Make changes in real-time, anywhere, anytime
* Track all versions and all changes made to the document using Zoho's native ability to see all intermediate versions
* Send the final version out for an instant e-signature or e-approval the moment the parties are "done" and get it signed in seconds
* Have signed versions sent automatically to all parties as PDFs
* Have archival copies automatically placed in all parties' EchoSign accounts
There's more to come here. But it's really an exciting extension of EchoSign a critical step earlier in the contract process - at the drafts/collaboration area. And it extends Zoho into a high value add segment of on-line document collaboration.
Try it - all you need to do is sign up for a free Zoho account. It will automatically prompt you for your EchoSign password when you then click "DigiSign."
| |
|
EchoSign is one of the fastest growing apps on AppExchange and we're pleased Salesforce is now featuring us along with Zimbra and Dreamteam as the top Office Productivity apps.
| |
|
EchoSign for Salesforce has rapidly taken off since its launch, and we've learned a lot of new things. One of the most interesting is that with EchoSign fully integrated into an existing enterprise-wide customer data repository (Salesforce.com), EchoSign for Salesforce provides a unique opportunity to truly and instantly go paperless for contract execution and archiving.
Statistics Canada put out a report this week that noted that the Paperless Office is not only a myth, but confirmed that use of paper is still growing exponentially:
"Not only is the notion of a paperless society defeated by existing data, but a visit to any modern office workplace will confirm that printers everywhere continue to spit out massive amounts of paper, and paper recycling bins are full."
The Life Out Here blog picked this up and took it to its most important conclusion:
"All these years we have been spewing out paper - what we should be doing is the inverse. We should be sucking up all the paper we encounter and we should put it into a database. Further, all of the paper that we normally spew out should not be printed. Instead, it too should go into the database." [emphasis added]
A problem with document and contract management systems is they require you to take paper content, scan it one way or another, and then manually input it into a database. Since manual steps are required, compliance will rarely be high enough to create confidence that a secondary paper back-up copy isn't necessary.
So what does this have to do with EchoSign for Salesforce and the Paperless Office? A lot. By emailing out contracts for signature from EchoSign for Salesforce, the second the contract is signed, not only are all parties emailed copies, but a PDF copy is automatically place in Salesforce.com as well. Automatically. No scanning, no inputting, no mistakes, no errors. While the document execution may or may not have been paperless (depending on if you used an EchoSign fax signature or e-signature), but the document database can now be made paperless in a totally automated fashion. And the signed contracts themselves automatically reside in a database trusted and relied upon by the enterprise - Salesforce.com.
Try EchoSign-for-Salesforce out on AppExchange.
| |
|
We received a testimonial this morning with a number of nice comments. The one that especially stood out is the appreciation of minimizing paper by using EchoSign:
Dear EchoSign,
We have been absolutely thrilled with your product. We use it regularly without any problems with our clients. It saves us valuable time, it is extremely easy to use, and has saved us many headaches. Also, we love being able to drastically minimize our paper trail. Thank you!
Sincerely,
CEPAdvantage.com
The team at Office Stuffer made a similar observation:
[EchoSign] completely automates getting paperwork signed, tracked and filed in either a totally paperless (with e-signatures) or mostly paperless (by digitizing faxes) way.
The paperless office isn't here today and probably will never totally arrive. But EchoSign can dramatically eliminate the amount of excess paper, whether you fax sign or esign.
In our next release, we're going to run a "promotion" where if you invite your colleagues to use EchoSign, and they do, we'll plant a tree for each one this does. Let us know what you think of this idea.
| |
|
Dennis Howlett at the leading accounting blog AccMan did a terrific write up of some of the obvious -- and also the more subtle -- benefits of EchoSign for the accounting profession:
"EchoSign provides a blindingly simple way of obtaining secure, signed copies of business critical documents. In our case the first one that springs to mind is the letter of engagement.
The really cool thing is that the recipient doesn’t have to be online but can return a document by fax if they wish. That might seem so 90’s to many readers but let’s face it, the majority of small businesses make minimal use of computing as it is . . .
If you look at the service in greater detail, you’ll find there are a myriad of ways in which the service can be used including internal document approval (the workflow is dead easy and includes reminders plus the ability to add side notes) and document archiving - one of the profession’s bugbears. It also makes a logical addition to client communications which could encourage those clients to take up the service for their own use. Needless to say, costs are trivially low.
This is one service whose simplicity belies its power. That’s the secret of creating great services that solve apparently complex problems."
Indeed, there's a lot of power under the hood at EchoSign. But we try and expose it to you just when you need - and keep it all very simple otherwise.
| |
|
We really enjoyed the piece at Because I Write, "EchoSign is Paperless Solution", which highlights a subtle but powerful part of EchoSign. The point of the post is that while the small number of very "important" contracts and documents at his company did get scanned in manually and made "digital" (often after being faxed back in the first place), the effort involved is so high to scan, tag, and input, that it can't practical be done for the far higher volume of 'mundane' documents that make up everyday business (here, 100,000+ documents).
The author notes that if all these contracts and documents had just been signed through EchoSign, they would have automatically been turned into digital PDFs, and routed to all parties that needed a digital copy:
"The initial idea of helping people to organize agreement, signing and exchange of documents is great . . . [But EchoSign's] solution is far bigger than just managing agreement and signing online. It could be a complete paperless solution.
In my little project ... we had to scan all the backlog and put them in one of our PC on the intranet. Due the size of the backlog we were only able to digitize important contractual documents, a small percentage of the whole lot….I’m talking about few full container load of pure papers. Incidentially we just cleared our site offices so we know the size of the forrest we have killed.
I’m talking about more than 100,000 records in our database, each record could be few pages of a letter or 50 pages of technical submissions full of calculations and drawings etc.
Going back in time we have duplicated our effort, i.e. we faxed the papers but had to scan them afterwards. If EchoSign was there 4 years ago we would have used their fax server as a node for the entire project, i.e. everyone faxes papers there and EchoSign manages the routing and distribution to the order of the sender."
EchoSign: send us your mundane, your boring, your routine contracts and agreements. That's the beauty of combining an incredibly easy to use product with an all-you-can-eat model (and for EchoSign Free, free): just use us for everything.
| |
|
One of our Enterprise customers using EchoSign in Sales Ops recently called the automated fax features of EchoSign a "Super eFax". It's an interesting observation, but in fact the products are in fact quite complementary. eFax is an incredibly easy-to-use improvement on the old analog POTS fax machine in the corner. Getting faxes sent to you by e-mail rather than falling on the floor and getting lost on a fax machine is a huge improvement. With over 14,000,000 users, eFax (nee: J2 Global Communications) is plainly doing a lot of things very well indeed.
EchoSign steps in and takes it to the next level when you are dealing with paperwork, contracts, approvals, timesheets, purchase orders, applications, etc. - the world of documents that get signed or approved. As TechCrunch put it, compared to electronic fax services, "eFax helps somewhat [in managing my documents], but EchoSign goes further". EchoSign makes sure your documents actually get signed; faxed back (or e-signed back); and routed to all the right parties. And it makes the whole document exchange process digital - even if your docs are faxed back by an analog fax machine.
In fact, quite a few of our Enterprise customers, including AtRoad, BrooksEckerd, Network General, and many others, use eFax and EchoSign together. Electronic fax is great for receiving documents. EchoSign takes it to the next level by making sure those documents are incorporated into your company's document workflow. EchoSign Enterprise customers can even integrate eFax into EchoSign. A complete summary of EchoSign vs. electronic fax services is here.
| |
|
